[GreenKeys] Ticker-tape first unveiled 1867

[Doug Alderdice]

Oh, man, those pix in the Wiki article bring back memories!  We had a 
360/30 mainframe at the high school I attended and was in the Comp Sci 
program.  I got to know our 1403 pretty well, and even made replacement 
carriage control tapes (to the right in the open pic) for it when they'd 
wear out; never punched one wrong, I believe.  All the various alignment 
knobs when changing forms to something like continuous feed labels or 
different paper than the 132-char wide green bar.

Ancient history.  Don't think ours automatically opened when it ran out 
of paper, though.  Might've been an option.

73,
Doug, KA2WFT


On 11/15/2020 9:27 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Nov 2020, Harold Hallikainen wrote:
> 
>> Amazing stuff! And remember high speed "chain printers?"
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_printer#Chain_printer
> 
> Ahhh, the IBM 1403 train printer...  It could slew paper so fast that by 
> the time that the operator realised that there something was wrong with 
> that print job, it has chewed through an entire box...
> 
> You also quickly learned to not rest your coffee cup upon it, as it would
> automatically open when out of paper.
> 
> Best printer I've ever used.
> 
> -- Dave, who accidentally mis-punched the channel tape